5 Building Blocks for Strong Characters
March 5, 2026 | Anna Hawkins
Characters are one of the most important, if not the single most important, element of a story. Modern reader preferences all but require that stories are built around strong characters. Their decisions, strengths, and weaknesses drive the plot. Their goals, idiosyncrasies, and growth are what get readers invested in their story.
But it’s all too easy for characters to fall flat on the page and to fail to live up to the promises of their narratives. In this blog post, we’ll discuss strategies for building characters who feel as dynamic as the worlds they inhabit.
Character Building Blocks
One of the easiest ways to make characters feel more dynamic is to consider their context with other characters and within the narrative and tailor how they interact with each other based on this context. Every character, from central POV characters all the way down to the innkeeper who only appears in one scene, has five things: a job/role, a personal goal, an appearance, a cultural context, and their own biases and convictions. These five building blocks define how characters will interact with each other. For example, our hero is going to interact with an elderly innkeeper from her own kingdom, who wants nothing more than to provide travelers with a safe place to sleep and a warm meal, very differently than the will with a young soldier from a rival kingdom who’s trying to escape from the horrors of war.
Let’s briefly discuss each of a character’s five components in more detail:
Job/Role – this building block is 1) your character’s role in the story (protagonist, antagonist, side character, etc) and 2) their actual job or societal role (innkeeper, dragon rider, farmer, noble, etc). Your character’s role in the story determines how familiar readers will be with them, and relatedly, how detailed you’ll need to be when working on the character’s other building blocks. Your character’s actual job or societal role will be part of determining how they interact with, perceive, and are perceived by other characters.
Personal Goal – everyone wants something, whether they’re a farmer who wants to make enough money to replace their ox that died last year, or a monarch who wants to survive a court full of backstabbing, power-hungry relatives. Giving your characters compelling goals, even before they kick off the plot of your story, will get readers invested in their success or failure and keep them turning the page.
Appearance – this is pretty self-explanatory, the aspects of your character that are obvious to others, including physical traits and personal style. When thinking about a character’s appearance, it’s important to consider not just how a character perceives themselves, but also how they will be perceived by other characters.
Cultural Context – the culture to which your character belongs has many aspects that can inform how your character moves through their world, including language, styles of dress, traditions, attitudes on gender and sexuality, religion, and food preferences. When thinking about a character’s cultural context, consider that in the real world, culture is often heavily influenced by environment and geography. This is one of the reasons it can be helpful to start with worldbuilding, as I’ll discuss below.
Biases/Convictions – these are the things your character believes in, aspects of culture or their role in the world that they accept as truth (whether or not they’re right about that). Give them at least one conviction that they hold very strongly, and would be willing to fight over.
Considering each of these five building blocks for every character that appears on the page will go a long way toward helping them and their interactions with other characters feel more real.
If you’re concerned I’ve left personality traits off this list, don’t worry! Personality is an important aspect of character, especially for the main characters that your readers will follow through the story. But, in fiction, a character’s specific personality traits are mainly important in regard to two things: 1) how they impact that character’s behavior and 2) the context of where and how that character appears in the story. A character may be naturally friendly, but that friendliness doesn’t really matter if readers only encounter them from the point of view of an enemy soldier. If readers encounter a friendly character from the point of view of their own companions, however, that natural friendliness should shine through. So, save personality traits for after you’ve thought about your character’s five building blocks, and already have an idea of how much of their personality readers will be able to see.
Pitfalls in Character Building
There are a lot of things that might make a character fall flat on the page, but I wanted to briefly touch on the two I see most often as an editor.
Lack of Context – the word “context” appears in this blog post a total of twelve times! This is because context is a very important piece in the puzzle of how to make characters feel real. The parts of a character that readers will see depend on their role in the world and their interactions with other characters. If a character is only seen in one context – always interacting with the same character or remaining static in their established role – the reader will see fewer aspects of their character and they will feel flat. Varying the contexts that characters are seen in and making sure all aspects of your world are well-developed will go a long way toward helping your characters feel more real.
Unexamined Bigotry/Stereotypes – it’s ok and important to explore bigotry and stereotypes in fiction, but doing so without examining and deconstructing them risks reinforcing them or giving readers the impression that you, the author, accept them. Characters who are built on unexamined stereotypes will feel flat, like caricatures of the group(s) to which they belong. If exploring stereotypes and bigotry is important for your story, make a conscious effort to educate yourself to make sure you’re not unintentionally reinforcing those ideas. Writing the Other: A Practical Approach by Nisi Shawl & Cynthia Ward is a good place to start.
An Approach for Character Building
“Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
Every author has their own strategy for character building, and I encourage you to practice and develop your own as you build your skills as an author! Below, you’ll find an approach that works for me. Maybe there are aspects of it that will work for you, too:
Worldbuild First – especially important for science fiction and fantasy authors. Characters may be the building blocks of a story, but they exist in the context of the world they inhabit. If you try to build a character without first having some idea of what their world is like, you’re going to end up doing more work trying to make a character fit into a world they weren’t made for. So, before jumping to character, try to get some worldbuilding done first, even if it’s only a few sketchy ideas about the world’s power structure or culture.
Throw a wrench in the gears – before thinking too much about your characters, try giving them a problem to solve. If you have some building blocks of worldbuilding, it shouldn’t be too hard to introduce a problem. And this problem can be anything, from a horse falling lame to a new disease burning through a kingdom. Solving this problem may not be your character’s ultimate goal, or it may spiral into something much larger for your characters to face, but once you have a problem, you can build characters who have a reason to be invested in this problem and either try to solve it or make it worse.
Stack your building blocks into an arc – now you’re ready to really start thinking about your characters. Go back to the building blocks we talked about before and start working out your character’s core details. These details will help you determine your character’s areas for growth and the kind of arc (internal or external) that will make their story most satisfying for readers. As you work through this step, don’t try to force anything. Building is about making sure you fit all the right blocks together the right way. Take the time to step back and allow the character to reveal themself and their arc to you. If you keep your worldbuilding and your problem in mind as you work on your character’s core details, you might find that the building blocks start falling into place almost on their own.
If you’re still struggling with building characters, Tomeworks is here to help! Schedule a consultation for a developmental edit or a custom coaching plan today.